The Admiral Fell
by Darcy Brandon
Summary: Takes place during the second part of the Homicide:LOTS crossover, Baby It's You. In Baltimore for the Janaway trial, McCoy reflects on a conversation he had with Det. Falsone at a bar.


_**A/N: Read and review, please! Usual disclaimers apply: I don't own them.**_

After he'd downed his second—or was it third?—glass of Glenlivet, Jack McCoy got up from the bar, waved a thanks to Paul Falsone, and headed out of the bar. Hands in his pockets, he caught a cab back to his motel.

The Admiral Fell was as drab as could be expected on the District Attorney's budget. He took off his tie and hung it on a hanger in the musty little closet. The whole place needed to be aired out—it was stuffy on top of musty--but this was Baltimore and if he opened the windows, there was the city stench that came with it. Instead, he stripped to his undershirt and boxers, pulled back the faded bedspread and laid back on the bed, within arms reach of the remote control for the TV and (yet another) bottle of scotch.

He poured a fresh glass of scotch into the tumbler with one hand and with the other, turned on the television. Flipping through it, he realized he was just in time for the evening news on every local station, each of which was leading with the Brittany Janaway case. He hardly needed to hear about the case on the news—like every case he prepared to try, it had consumed him, and would continue to do so until Brittany Janaway's father was put away for her rape and murder.

Finally, he found something non-related to the Janaways. Was it QVC or that leg wax infomercial? At this point, they were all the same to him. He'd stopped paying attention, the television serving only to reflect colors off the screen and offer some amount of background noise to his thoughts.

Looking up at the little flecks in the ceiling, Jack considered his earlier conversation with Paul Falsone at the bar. He wasn't sure why the young detective had chosen to ask such philosophical questions, and to him, an out-of-town ADA. Falsone had been eager to talk though, almost desperate to work things out in his own mind, and McCoy had been attentive in listening. He'd seen cops like Falsone _not_ talk about what they saw on the job, not try to understand and that never ended well. Just look at his own father. Talk about taking the job out on your family. Falsone seemed to have his head on straight, though, and from what McCoy could tell, was genuinely concerned with his young son.

Asking him about the nature of evil, though…Jack sighed. He told Falsone only what he knew—that most men would never dream of harming their children, but that some men had no consciences. Why that was…or what turned a father into a rapist…that was another story. He knew what a clinical psychiatrist would say—he'd put enough of them on the stand—but at the end of the day, there were always guys who didn't fit the profile, always cases that made no sense.

He closed his eyes, remembering that day on the beach. He was no rapist, far from it, but he had hardly been father of the year. Joanie had been up the beach a little because he and Joanna had been fighting. They'd split up twice already and this had been their third and final attempt at reconciliation.

He was obsessed with his job, Joanna never stopped saying. He loved the office more than his wife and child.

She didn't understand that he was doing it for them. She didn't understand that there were worse people than Steven Janaway out there. Serial killers and murderers-for-hire and neglectors and endangerers. It was more than a job…it _was_ his life.

He had given up his wife and child for it, for fighting for victims and justice…and yet, how much thought a day did he actually give those he fought for?

He wasn't a cop—unlike Falsone and Munch, and (back home) Briscoe and Curtis, he never saw the dead bodies, or the families, until the victims were clean-cut autopsy photos—Exhibit A, and their families in the front row of the gallery, tidied up and paraded into court as leverage for the prosecution—Exhibit B.

It was easy to feel nothing during the process of preparing for a case—they were names on a paper, the deeds done to them part of a fill-in-the-blank--and then turn on the emotion for the trial. But even then, even when he was consumed with a case: where was his focus?

He could bring them up, name them by name, tell the defense and the jury why it was wrong, why the defendant deserved the needle…He felt fury toward defendants, wanted them to pay, but how many times did he really, truly think of the victim?

Maybe early on he'd been more like Falsone—wondering who the victims were beyond a case number, who they might have become had they not been killed. He'd been idealistic once too, believe it or not.

Jamie Ross said she still saw it in him. She told him it was behind his drive to win. He smiled a little sadly at the thought of her, one assistant among many who had made the mistake of believing in him. He always proved them wrong. Lately, all he was seeing behind his drive to win was his own ego.

It was hot in the little room, even more so than when he'd first returned from the bar. He got up, sweating, his hair sticking to the back of his neck, and went over to the bathroom sink. He took off his undershirt and splashed his face and neck with water.

Jack glanced up into the mirror and for a moment saw his father. James McCoy's disheveled hair, watery eyes and nose red from drinking stared back at him and he stared into the image, trying to stare down his demons along with it.

It wasn't the first or the last time he would see his father in the mirror, and that—he thought to himself—that was what drove him to long hours, non-existent weekends and fighting to prove he was not like him, fighting to show that men who broke the law, who hurt their families got what they deserved.

In showing that he was not a violent man, in proving to the world that he did not neglect his family as his father had done, Jack McCoy had walked out on his own marriage and child.

All in all, at the end of the day, as he turned on the water in the tub, watched the streams of it fall over head, leaned against the wall of the shower, he didn't feel much better, or much higher on the food chain, than the man he was trying to put away.


End file.
